Navy ends century and a half of ALL-CAPS messages

New message routing system means Navy can now use lowercase in messages.

The US Navy has reached a new milestone in electronic communications. According to a report in the Navy Times, Chief of Naval Personnel Vice Adm. Scott Van Buskirk recently issued a policy directive that used something not seen before in Navy communications: lowercase letters.

When I was an officer in the US Navy back in the late 1980s, the closest thing we had to e-mail was a “message board” that was circulated from the ship’s radio room. Those printed electronic messages, regardless of their content or classification, all had one thing in common: they were in all caps, all the time. The practice dated back to the 1850s, when messages were sent via telegraph and flashing lights, and coded letters came in only one case. That practice continued as radio teletype was adopted for fleet broadcasts, and it was hard-coded into Navy cryptographic systems.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the practice continued because messages were prepared for transmission by being typed or printed on a form that required an optical character recognition font which lacked lowercase letters. Even as messages moved fully into electronic production, the standard of having broadcast communication in all caps lived on, unhindered by progress. That’s because the Fleet Broadcast System’s message routing continued to rely on legacy systems that could only handle uppercase characters. Now that has changed with the introduction of a new message routing system based on cheaper, more modern technology, and message-writers can now feel free to mix it up and use lowercase text.

There is no word on where the Navy’s communication policy stands on emoticons, however.

Sean Gallagher / Sean is Ars Technica's IT Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.